The Next Ridge

The PEACE Act: How Oregon's Ballot Initiative Could End Hunting, Ranching & Wildlife Management as We Know It

• The Next Ridge • Episode 5

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Is hunting about to become a criminal act in Oregon? In this eye-opening episode of the The Next Ridge, we sit down with Ryan — a 33-year veteran Oregon State Police Fish & Wildlife Officer — to break down Initiative Petition 28, also known as the Oregon Peace Act. This proposed ballot measure would eliminate the legal exemptions that currently protect hunting, fishing, trapping, and ranching from Oregon's animal abuse statutes, effectively making all forms of licensed hunting a misdemeanor offense punishable by 90–180 days in jail.
Ryan walks us through exactly what IP 28 would criminalize — from deer hunting and crabbing to pest control and euthanizing injured animals — and who it would impact: 330,000+ licensed hunters, 500,000+ licensed anglers, 37,000 farms and ranches, Oregon's nine federally recognized tribes, veterinarians, wildlife biologists, and more. We discuss the economic devastation this would cause to rural Oregon communities, the anti-science approach to wildlife population management promoted by the bill's supporters, and why emotionally-driven conservation policy consistently fails. We also dig into how similar incremental tactics have already been used to effectively end beaver trapping in Oregon starting January 2026.
This isn't just an Oregon issue. If this kind of legislation gains traction on the West Coast, it will move inland — and that means Idaho, Montana, and beyond are next. Whether you're a hunter, angler, rancher, or simply a meat-eater who believes in your right to feed your family, this episode gives you the facts you need to stay informed and get involved.

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SPEAKER_01

Welcome, Ryan. Thank you. Yeah, this is gonna be this is gonna be a great episode. I'm actually really excited to do this one. Austin, I've been talking about it for a while now and excited to get this one out there for the people. So today we welcome everybody to the next Ridge podcast. We have Ryan, who is a fish and game officer from the state of Oregon. Welcome. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, absolutely. Glad to be here. Yeah, no, it's this is gonna be exciting. I think uh I think a lot of people uh need to hear this, and uh especially with a bunch of people that are coming from Oregon over here to Idaho. Uh primarily just want to focus on focus today on the bill that they're trying to implement that's gonna be voted on this November, I believe. Uh before we get into that though, I would love to just get to know, let our audience get to know who you are, and uh just go from there, man. So tell us a little bit about Ryan. Yeah, the story of Ryan.

SPEAKER_02

Uh born and raised in Oregon, and uh yeah, I can't wait to leave Oregon. So I mean it's sad. I I I actually am embarrassed to say that I live in Oregon for so many reasons. Uh it's pretty bad. But uh um started hunting when I was 12 and uh continued to hunt and really enjoyed that aspect of just life. And so when I got hired um by the Oregon State Police, it really was my goal to be in the fish and wildlife side of things. So Oregon and Alaska they do everything different than any other state, you know, DNRs and fish and game or game of fish, however you say it for whatever state you're in. Um, Alaska and Oregon, the enforcement for the fish and wildlife side of things is done by the state police or the state troopers. Gotcha.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, well, so wearing a lot of hats. Yeah, so how does that work with uh you know you obviously go to the academy and all that? Is there do you have to apply for that position or is that like a rotation essentially to uh do fishing game?

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, yeah. So you uh you go through the standard academy. Well, it's different now, right? When I got hired on, you know, I I started as a cadet at 18, so that was 33 years ago. Okay, so quite quite a while ago, and then I got hired on full-time, went through the academy. That academy was um put on by the state police, and now everyone goes through the DPSST, so the standards and training, the central training that everyone goes through. Everyone goes through that same process, right? We just do a little bit extra at the beginning, some extra training, OSP specific, and then extra training at the end, OSP specific training. Um, and then once you're assigned, I mean you you're told where you're gonna go. You have some options, right? You have three or five different, hey, I'd like to go to these places, and maybe you do, maybe you don't. Um, and then you go there. Oftentimes you're assigned to patrol first. Um, every now and then, if we really have some um critical vacancies in fish and wildlife, you're assigned straight out of the academy to go into fish and wildlife. And you know when you get hired, you know, you're going here, you're gonna be in this division, which is great, right? You can plan for it. Um, but I think in my experience, what I've seen that guys do best when they go into patrol first, right? Get out there, absolutely, get out there and you work the street for five to seven years, and then at that point, you're like, all right, I'm ready to do something a little bit different. I'm I'm ready to go into fish and wildlife and do that. Try and get your mic there. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I've never done a podcast before. You're doing great already. But yeah, so you you really want that experience. You want to get out there, you want to stop a lot of cars and meet a lot of bad people, right? Yeah, and know how to talk. Because when you get out into the fish and wildlife side of things, you've got to be able to use your words to be able to de-escalate because you're a long ways away from everyone. Yeah. Right. Your backup and everything, especially where I'm at, I'm in the middle of nowhere. Yeah. My nearest backup, oftentimes, if the county deputy isn't on, is over an hour away.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, indeed.

SPEAKER_02

And so you gotta know.

SPEAKER_04

Yeah, we're we're familiar with that. Uh when we worked in Douglas County as as deputies, it was what there was most nights, it was two to three deputies for a oh, what was the square miles of 1,800 square miles.

SPEAKER_01

Square feet really small.

SPEAKER_04

You must you must be in the real estate world. Yeah, sorry. I love that. So yeah, I mean, totally. You know, we both started at a city city agency, um, got our feet wet there, interacted with a lot of people, and then to go to a county where it was more rural, and you've got well, there's no state patrol that worked after, I don't know, 9 p.m. Yeah, not earlier. Yeah, and that and that's a consistent problem in a smaller area because they staff it with less people. Yeah. And so, yeah, you're our our backup was, you know, they could be all the way down in Hawthorne, and you're up in the you know, by Brule, Wisconsin, and they're an hour away.

SPEAKER_02

Okay, yeah, I was wondering what state it was, yeah, yeah. Northern Wisconsin. Northern Wisconsin.

SPEAKER_04

Yeah, so yeah, yeah, absolutely. On point, like you gotta know how to talk to people and de-escalate situations and relate to people and you know, not get confrontational when it doesn't need to be.

SPEAKER_02

Absolutely. Yeah. And in reality, you know, a lot of what we do anymore is that direction, anyways, right? You're non-confrontational unless you need to be, right? You don't need to up that ante. You want to bring that ante down, right? And bring the people down. Um not not bring the people down, but you know what I mean? Yeah, the emotions. Bring the emotions down, right? Yeah, for sure. The power of a cigarette. Yeah, that's true, man. Absolutely. So there were there was a county deputy um and he smoked, right? And I I don't smoke, so it's it's harder for me to understand, but he always had a pack of cigarettes in his pocket for just that that dude that he would come across. He's like, hey, here you go. Here, I'll light it for you. Yeah, just relax. And it would just chill him out.

SPEAKER_04

Instant. It is, it's a real thing. So I can I I got a funny story. I'll tell him that one. Um well, actually, I don't know which one you're talking about, but the stack one. Oh, you'll have to tell that one. This is just uh like a comedy skit. I uh I had just watched it was hilarious. And he was talking about the power of a cigarette and like these newer generations with the vape pens and like all these, like it's not the same as a cigarette. A cigarette makes you contemplate your decisions because it takes a while. You you you have to smoke the whole thing. Whereas like a vape pen, it's just like instant, and then you just puff it on it all the time. Cigarettes more deliberate, and the power of those things was just unreal. Yeah, so it's just fired up, and you're like, hey man, I got you need to smoke.

SPEAKER_05

Yeah, I don't have any. I got you.

SPEAKER_04

Yeah, gotcha. And immediately you're just like right there with them, they're your friend. Now you can work with them. But it was really funny. He was talking about that.

SPEAKER_01

I'm like, well, that's accurate. It's very accurate. I still think of Stack's video. I think you're the one that took the video of it. Um, this is when I was working out in Kooteny County and now back in Idaho, um, but in Wisconsin, our buddy Stack, I think it was a DUI, and it was an old guy, and he was bringing him to jail. And and the video, I think it's you recording or J Mac. I think it was J Mac. Yeah, so Stack's in his uh his pickup truck, and the dude that got the DUI is in the back seat. Stack's got the window down for this for the dude with the DUI, and the dude's this old dude smoking a dart. Just smoking a dart, going to jail and all.

SPEAKER_04

That was awesome.

SPEAKER_02

Oh man. Well, when I first started, we didn't have cages in our trucks. So literally, they sat next to you. Oh wow. No way. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. What were you clear? You had to just just pickups, you know, and you just they sat next to you, and you had to really just understand hey, don't get froggy. Yeah, I don't definitely. I'm operating this vehicle. Don't get froggy. Oh my gosh. So pretty crazy. But yeah, um, so but having said that, you know, that's my background, but nothing that I'm gonna talk about today is gonna be in any way the uh official word of my employer. I'm talking for myself, and uh oftentimes what I'm gonna be talking about, I'm gonna reference some things specifically from associations that I'm a part of. Um Organ Hunters Association, Organ Trappers Association. I'm um used to be part of Mule Deer, Rocky Mountain Elk, all those things. Um, these are all organizations that are doing what they can to fight, you know, this uh initiative petition.

SPEAKER_04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

So and I think sometimes when we when we say they and this and that, we got to really kind of focus in on who it is we're talking about. Yeah. And we're talking about in this particular instance, so Oregon's one of those states that allows its citizens, if they have an idea, and they get a hold of their legislature, legislator, whoever they that may be, they say, Hey, can you bring this up? We'd like this to be law, right? Um we want ATVs to operate on the highways, right? Doesn't can't do that in Oregon. You can do that here in Idaho, right? So that'd be one of those things you bring up with your legislators and say, hey, we'd like this to be to happen. And the legislator goes and they discuss it with the other legislators, and it may come up, it may not, right? If it doesn't, then you have the opportunity as a citizen to gather enough signatures to put something on the ballot so that everyone gets to vote on it. Now, this can be good and this can be awkward, right? Yeah, you know, it it can be bad. I mean, really, you know, there's there's various ways depending on how you look at life. And um, so in this instance, we're talking about a petition, an initiative petition that is attempting to gather enough signatures, and they're almost there, right? Really? So they had to have 117,000 signatures, and then you have to go through and you have to validate them all that they're actual voters. Um they've turned in over 100,000 as of February, and they have till July to get to 117,000. So when we talk about they in this instance, this is a group of people who believe in what we're gonna talk about. They believe it's important. Um it's not necessarily the legislators, not unless they're the majority of citizens in the state. It's it's a group who is attempting to force their beliefs upon someone else. Yeah. Right.

SPEAKER_04

Well, and so this bill is called the Peace Act. Peace Act. What does it stand for?

SPEAKER_02

I have to look it up to remember because it's um it's because it's so peaceful to me. And um it in no way makes my blood boil um at all. The peace and the peace act. Yeah. So I apologize because I I do need to read that's okay. You know, that's one of the things that I do. I don't like to like someone asks me a question at work and they're like, hey, can you give me the answer? I'm like, yeah, I'll get back to you because I want to look it up. I'm a researcher. I want to make sure you have the best answer possible. So they're like, oh, I want the answer right now. I'm like, no, I could just blurt something out and be wrong, and then I look dumb. I don't I don't like doing that. I'm guessing the P is for people. People, yes. People that's on a good start for elimination. Oh that's usually not a good start either. No, of animal cruelty exemptions.

SPEAKER_05

Oh yes.

SPEAKER_02

So as we dig into this act, it'll make sense what those animal cruelty exemptions are. Yeah, I'm curious. Yeah. So this is initiative petition 28. Um, just as a little bit of a history for this, and I I'm gonna put my glasses on here to and I'm pulling this information from the um Oregon Hunters Association, which reminds me I do need to renew my membership. So um at the end of the month, I am due. Um but this affects hunters and anglers, and anyone in Oregon who participates economically on the following activities would face criminal liability, right? So we're not just talking like, hey, don't do this, you know, it's it's taboo, whatever. It's we're going to penalize you criminally if you do this. So thirty three hundred and thirty thousand plus licensed hunters. Wow. Five hundred thousand plus licensed anglers, thirty-seven thousand farms and ranches. Holy cow. Employing over eighty thousand workers, wildlife biologists, trappers, pest control operators.

SPEAKER_00

Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_02

It's all the way down to you you can't trap a mouse. Right. Um, Oregon's nine federally recognized tribes and treaty hunting and fishing rights, veterinarians, and animal research institutions. So it's all those people that this is going to affect.

SPEAKER_01

And my question is who's going to enforce this? If I I doubt it would be passed this year, but I know their whole thing is they're trying to, I mean, yeah, maybe you never know. Yeah. You never know. But I mean, if they continue to do this year after year after year and the younger generation's not doing this or getting into it, maybe they will have the numbers one day. But who would enforce this? Right. Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_02

And that's gonna be uh it's going to come back to the fish and wildlife enforcement entity. And who is gonna be in those positions? Because it isn't gonna be me. No, right? And it's gonna not gonna be anyone who thinks like me or wants to participate in these activities like me, who believes that it is not cruel what we are doing, feeding our own families. Right.

SPEAKER_01

So, yeah, who's gonna enforce it?

SPEAKER_02

Right.

SPEAKER_01

Right, and I'd say most of most of y'all believe the same way that you do, correct?

SPEAKER_04

Correct. Yeah, I would say so. Yeah, you know, yeah, and even if you're not a sportsman and you like to eat meat, um, that's gonna affect you as well. Oh, absolutely.

SPEAKER_01

Everything's gonna be broader.

SPEAKER_04

Everything you like cattle farms, chicken farms, any any kind of farming is gonna be exnate.

SPEAKER_02

You can't so what are you going to do? Can you imagine the economic impact of all of your ranches? Anything that that grows an animal, raises an animal, is now gonna be uh illegal.

SPEAKER_04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

Right? Because you can't kill it. In fact, if it's injured uh under this act, you can't put it down and properly euthanize it to end its suffering. Wow. So you have to coddle it in its suffering and watch it suffer.

SPEAKER_04

Oh, that's horrific. I just think about one nature's absolutely hardcore when it comes to stuff like that. Or traffic, right? I mean, like how many times have we all probably had to go dispatch a deer because it was hit by a car? Um, so now you're just telling me I gotta sit here and watch it. Um and uh that's that's horrible. And like and to talk even on like the veterinary sty side of things, so now you've got um uh an animal or a pet that is suffering and you can't do anything about it. Yeah, you just have to be able to let nature take its courses, what they're they think is the right option. Absolutely, yeah.

SPEAKER_02

Wow, yeah. And so we'll dig into a couple of these things, but basically what it does, this initiative petition takes away under law you have like animal abuse statutes, right? You have animal cruelty statutes, and then under that you have uh exemptions to that hunting, fishing. Um you have uh not blankets.

SPEAKER_01

I'm just gonna pull it up. Yeah, that would affect crab like cra crabbing's huge over there, right? In in Oregon, crabbing. Yeah, yeah. On the coast, absolutely. No fishing, yeah. Everything's done. My gosh. Yeah, you can't do anything. And oysters, oysters, isn't that a big thing too? Going on clamming or no claming.

SPEAKER_02

I don't yeah, I don't I don't know about it. Yeah, clamming, yeah. Yeah, clamming is like huge. Like our guys do the uh clamming enforcement because there's you can only have so many. Yeah, that's why I wouldn't work on the coast because you have to know all your clams. I don't clam identification course.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, there are different types of clams.

SPEAKER_02

There are wow and yeah, and like they're literally yeah, there's this shellfish time, and you have to spend so much time, like you can only have five of these, or I don't even know what the numbers are, but it's not what I want to do. It's not what I want to spend my time with. That's why I live in eastern Oregon. I don't live on the coast. Um so yeah, so this initiative petition goes all the way back to 2020. Oh, wow. So they and they started this process back then. So we're now six years down the road, and if it doesn't pass this time, you know in two years, four years this is gonna come back, and they're gonna have more people. So they literally have been failing to qualify for the ballot, but they're getting closer and closer each time they come at this. Um, and so 117,173 people, uh, valid signatures is the threshold that they need to meet to get it onto the fall ballot. They're over 100,000 signatures in February were turned in. Of course, they got to verify those. Um common questions. Would I pity earn hunting in Oregon? Yes. It would remove the legal exemption that currently protects hunting from animal organ's animal abuse statutes. All forms of licensed hunting would become criminal acts under organ law. Wow. Yeah, 90 to 180 days in jail. Wow. To go out and get your meal to catch a fish.

SPEAKER_04

And I mean that that probably and that like we talked about earlier, that trickles all the way down to you know, you've got rodents in your house. Yes. And the same penalty applies. The same. Yeah. Wow. You you got a mouse in your in your cupboard and you gotta figure it out.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. And I I was watching that video. I was watching that um this video on it, and the the interviewer was asking the guy, one of the main guys that's responsible for this act. He's like, How are you gonna control the population? And I'm pretty sure the guy interviewing is pro hunter. Um, because that's a big thing, obviously in conservation. What are we doing, right?

SPEAKER_04

Right. Yeah, yeah. We're maintaining populations of all of all species.

SPEAKER_01

Yep.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah. So you have you have a set number of animals that are out there in the environment. Um, so many of them are gonna dis die from disease, from vehicle strikes, you know, just life, right? And so you have only a set amount that can live in that environment. So using small numbers, if a hundred can live in that environment for that area, you want to keep that number near a hundred. If you have 200 animals on the population because you can't kill any, you now have starvation and death for a hundred animals. Yeah. And so that's where hunting and that um and other forms of population control reduce those numbers to the amount where the animal can live in that environment sustainable.

SPEAKER_04

That's kind of uh like the wild horses down in uh New Mexico or um Arizona, like oh Nevada, everywhere. Nevada, yeah. Or they have to trap these horses and then BLM actually auctions them off, and you can buy wild Mustangs from them. Um, but they have to do that because otherwise there's no control over those herds, and they there's not enough environment for them all to live free. I mean, as much as I know there's many, many people out there that would rather just see them out there. Yeah, but now you're talking about suffering. Now these you know, mom can't provide for the foal, so she dies, and now this foal has no source of food, and then that foal dies, and it's just it's tragic, it's nature. But uh as humans, we have a right to be stewards to the land and the animals and help as much as we can, and that's where hunting comes in. And you know, if you keep you know, if you don't have a control over a population, like you said, now you're more vehicle strikes, um, your insurance is gonna go up because now there's no regulation of these animals, so there's gonna be more.

SPEAKER_02

Oh, absolutely. You know, yeah.

SPEAKER_04

The the implications that come from something like this passing is just I think far outweighs the you know, kind of their thoughts on humane. And and I think a lot of it too is uh people think of hunters or people who don't agree with hunting, look at hunters and think we're we're mean and we're cruel and you know, we don't care about the animals. Well, you know what? One percent. You know, you've you probably have a percentage of people out there, and I'm sure you've dealt with them on your job where they don't care. They're just out there for sport, they just wanna they just wanna kill something, they just wanna who knows. Right. I think the majority of people that hunt and are outdoorsmen care deeply about the animals that we pursue to feed our families. And we want ethical, humane harvests.

SPEAKER_02

Quick clean kill. Yeah. That's what we're after. We're not we're not looking to wound something, you know. And I've taught hunter education for about 15 years now, and that's what we instill in our our students, right? Is that quick clean kill. You know, we're not looking for to make this thing suffer. We want the good shot. We wait until that branch is out of the way, right? It steps out from behind the the tree or the bush or whatever, because that even that little thing can deflect that bullet or that arrow. For sure. You know, and and that's what we're looking for. And so we're we're not here to make these things suffer, right? We're here to feed our families because we choose to eat a very natural product that's that's good for us. Yeah. Right? It's not processed in some factory somewhere, obviously not in Oregon if this passes, because all of that's going away, that entire industry. And you know, and then you talk about that industry in itself. And you guys are in the real estate world. What is that gonna do to real estate values of these ranches that are now useless? Oh, plummet.

SPEAKER_04

I mean, they're gonna lose they'd lose everything because everything they can't stay in business anymore. And uh the argument that that uh you know they the people with this bill have against that, it's like, okay, well, what happens to these? And uh, I know the one of the main guys pushing behind it had said in an interview, uh, well, you know, studies on chicken farms show that you can convert those barns into growing mushrooms, and they do very well. You're like, okay, so you're telling me that you're just gonna get rid of chicken and start feeding everybody. You're you're gonna convert everybody in the state of Oregon to be a vegetarian. That's what they want.

SPEAKER_02

And here's what a lot of this comes down to, besides all the uh economic effects and everything, is uh uh you are you, this group, this small group of people who believe that this should be this should happen, you're going to force this upon the majority uh of the state, the majority of Oregonians, because of this belief that everyone should eat a certain way. Why don't we reverse that? And if you choose to live your life that way, then you just eat that way, right? Yeah. And you live your life that way and keep it to yourself, right? The rest of us let us do what we are doing that's shown through history and time that it is not cruel and that it is a way of life. Yeah. But then you get people, well, we're just gonna change the way of life. Okay, you change your way of life, yeah. Don't change, don't come into my house and change my way of life, right? And so it it's just that attitude of I'm going to force this upon you because I think it's better.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, they're miserable, they're miserable fucks. I'm gonna say right there, dude. That's exactly what they are. Seriously.

SPEAKER_02

You know, and they gotta spread that misery to everybody else.

SPEAKER_01

Exactly. Right? Exactly. We all saw it in 2020. Oh, yeah, the whole all the mask stuff and all that. Who are the most miserable people to be around? Usually them. The ones wearing masks, yeah. Well then, the ones still wearing masks.

SPEAKER_04

Well, that's ones, yes. And their car by themselves wearing masks. Yes. And you know, it the scary thing is that it's got traction.

SPEAKER_02

Yes. That you know every time this new iteration, a new initiative petition, a new number, and all that, it every time it comes around, it's more traction. And my thought is who's signing up for this? Uh-huh. What are they telling them? Yeah. And what what's going on in their head? And I don't know, maybe we need to outreach to those people and be like, hey, you know, you you have choice. Yeah. Why are we forcing non-choice upon people? Right. We should be opening this up to choice, not forcing a non-choice. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_04

Yeah, I mean, and and then you come back into the the agriculture side of things, right? And so, you know, it's one thing you want to come after hunting. People have been doing that for forever, right? PETA. You know, it but now you're talking about people who have had generational ranches um and farming.

SPEAKER_02

Oh, well, that's oh, but that's generational wealth. We can't have that either. Yeah, right. That's true. Exactly. I mean, you can't, you can't I don't know. That's that's a whole different topic. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

There's two things that you guys just touched on, maybe cli uh they clicked. Uh so cruelty, right? That's part of the thing, cruelty. So essentially milking a goat to get is that cruelty? Is that you know, if you want to do like goat milk and what it what is what is the term cruelty? Like, what does that show, right? I think what's the definition of it?

SPEAKER_04

From what I understand, it's you know the harvesting or killing of animals. So yeah, so I think you could probably keep you know, dairy farms. You can still do dairy farms. Because they're not killing them.

SPEAKER_02

So here's the weird part about this, all right. So I'm and I'll get to that, but I want to read the actual definition. But um, this removes exemptions, right? This is removing these exemptions to say it's okay to do normal farming practices, etc., uh, and not limited to so hunting and fishing and all that is included in that. Um they take every reference to domestic animal and they remove domestic. So this is every animal. So when when we go through this and we talk about this, think about a wild animal and now think about what you have to provide for this wild animal. Okay. So adequate shelter does not include crawl spaces under buildings or parts of buildings. Um, the inside of a vehicle, if the animal, wild animal raccoon, you know, if it's if it's in your vehicle, uh, is kept in a vehicle in a manner or for a length of time that is likely to be detrimental to the animal's health or safety. So if you have a squirrel that's living in there, you got to get provide it with some air conditioning underneath the hood. I guess that makes sense. Um, you had some creatures living in your tundra. Yeah, thank you, Montana. Yeah. Um yeah, so um we go through this. Um it completely removes this entire section, which says good animal husbandry includes but is not limited to the dehorning of animals, the docking of sheep, horse, swine, castration or neutering of livestock according to accepted practices of veterinary medicine or animal husbandry. So basically takes out all that science behind what's done and throws science out the window. It's no longer okay. Um let's see. We get down here open and adequate access to potable water in sufficient quantity to satisfy the animal's needs. So we're now gonna have to provide that to all of our wild animals as well. No because it got rid of domestic, the word domestic anywhere out of this. Yeah. So now we're gonna have to provide shelter, which by the way, if you read through here, is not a dirt floor. So wild animals are should not be on dirt floors. Oh, so if you got if you get horses, yeah. They can't be on dirt, yeah. Yep, you have to keep them warm. Wow. Because they're their natural bodies fur is not enough. Um yeah. I just wanted to. You go down this rabbit hole, right? And this rabbit hole just keeps spiraling all the way down.

SPEAKER_01

If you really break it down, yeah.

SPEAKER_02

There's what is this gonna cost your taxpayers to provide all this for your animals?

SPEAKER_04

Yeah, because you're gonna lose all of the funding that you get from hunters and anglers who purchase tags and out-of-state hunters that come there and buy tags.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, we care the most about all wildlife. Yes, right. We do, yeah.

SPEAKER_02

So there's gonna be a separate fund, and this fund is gonna be funded by the people who are now getting a charge for trapping mice. And in my case, um, you know, I have rock chucks in my ceiling, like above my bed, and I have like ground squirrels and rodents and all kinds of stuff. Yeah, you can't kill that stuff, you can't remove it from your house, even though that stuff can bring in hauntivirus and especially off the fleas of ground of ground squirrels, you know. Sure. Don't worry about that.

SPEAKER_04

Well, that's those ground squirrels will burrow underneath your structures and cause settling or cause structural damage to your home or your barn or your facilities or whatever.

SPEAKER_02

Or if you have a 130-year-old house like I'm in, and there's no insulation in the walls or sill plates or anything like that, they just crawl up through the walls and you hear them crawling at night, and they dance and have parties above your head at night. So, yeah. Um that's the part of living in an old house, I guess. Um I love it. So, yeah, so you can't do any of these things. Um, so what we're talking about is physical injury, you know, back to what it is that we can't do. Um physical trauma, impairment of physical condition, or substantial pain. And that, of course, that's substantial pain is where you get to actually killing an animal, right? Um physical trauma means fractures, cuts, punctures, bruises, burns, or other wounds. So you all your trapping is out, all of your even if it's in a cage, there's there's parts in here where you can't have a you can't have an animal in a cage, including a bird, if it has a wire bar, uh wire bottom. Oh, you just gotta let your pet birds just hang out. Well, you need to give them a flat surface because that's what birds enjoy is a flat surface that they can't get their feet around, right? No. Yeah. None of this makes sense. Um well. So not it takes away cruelly causing the death of an animal, and it just states causes the death of an animal. So if you cause the death death of an animal, you are in violation. Um but hey, but there there is an upside to this, right? Okay, this the they they made this palatable for everybody because they being the small group that's trying to impose their will upon everyone. Um it's not gonna be felonies anymore. They're just gonna be misdemeanors. Oh. Great. Yeah, so that's fine. It's you're no longer gonna be prevented from having a firearm or or going to prison necessarily until you have five or six of these and you're on the matrix and it just keeps going up, right? Wow. That matrix of when you have so many crimes and when you're charged with another one, it keeps getting worse and worse and you get to spend more time in prison. Yeah. Um, but they made it palatable by reducing from class A misdemeanors to class B, from class C felonies to class A misdemeanors, stuff like that. Wow. Yeah. So it's just it's palatable. Um and not only that, but since you're gonna be in trouble after you kill that mouse and you you pay this fine, it goes into this fund. But that fund has a really good purpose, right? That fund is going to create public public feeding centers where they're gonna provide you with food. Well, oh vegetarian food, I assume. Well, I mean, they can cart it in, they can truck it in from other states.

SPEAKER_04

Yeah, you'd you'd you'd be relying on more control from all of your animal products.

SPEAKER_01

Govern me harder, daddy. That's what I want to hear.

SPEAKER_02

We would certainly yeah, so not only have we created this when I was a kid, right? We were on food stamps, okay, and it sucked. I mean, that's just the way it was, though, right? We didn't have a lot of money. And so we had we went down and we got cheese and we got milk because we needed it as a as a large family. Not, I mean, there was four of us kids, so it it was enough that my parents weren't making enough money to be able to feed us, right? As as well as they wanted to. So we and and we were on food stamps, and that that was great. Is that what you where you want to be your entire life? Now, there are some people that want to be there. This is true. I mean, we've dealt with them on the job.

SPEAKER_05

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02

There are people that want to live in that condition, but then the rest of us don't. We want to lift ourselves out of that poverty, and we want to be able to feed ourselves. Yeah, absolutely. Right? Yeah, and and live our own lives and determine our own lives, right?

SPEAKER_04

Not be hand fed everything and just suck off the teat, which is sad that that's the society that we live in. Uh huh. You know, yeah. A lot of people just want handouts and don't want to work, and and this it pedals right to those folks, you know, because as long as they're still getting what they need. They're signing a petition.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, well, yeah, yeah. Because there's more, there's gonna be more food. I mean, why wouldn't you? Right. So, yeah, so this is going to fund these food centers, whether private or public. And of course, if they're private, you know, nonprofits never make money. Right. Right, yeah, they're not making any money there. The CEOs aren't like millionaires. You're right, right? Okay, this is not opening, oh, there's a seven or five or seven board committee that if your job doesn't allow you to get away, you know, like pay you to come and be part of this volunteer committee to oversee this whole project, we'll pay you. There's no money behind any of this, right? You're right. Yeah. I mean what what do we always say? Follow the money, right? Oh, absolutely. You know, well, for example, looking at some of these properties, right? I'm always digging into these properties when we're up here, right? Because we want to live up here, right? So I'm digging in these properties. I'm looking, okay, on X. Who's the owner? All right, it's this LLC. So then I go to Idaho LLC business registry. I look up who that is, I find out who the principal owners are and all that stuff, and they start looking up their names, and I'm like, huh, interesting. All right. This is some trust fund out of Texas, right? Or some trust fund. And it's just like you follow the money, right? And you're just like, oh, okay. Maybe I don't want to give them money. That's funny. That's that's awesome. I do. I just, you know, I follow that. You know, if it's just average Joe trying to sell his place, that's great. But if it's some trust fund, we were looking at one last night and it came back to some like nine million dollar a year budget that they had and they given over, given away. It was, you know, it's obviously some long-term wealth, right? Someone who's never had a job except managing money and giving it away. And I'm just like, yeah, we don't want any part of that. You just subdivided a 30-acre parcel into four parcels, and now you're trying to make the most out of it. It's like just to make more money. And I yeah.

SPEAKER_01

Man, I want to touch back on that whole population control though, because we forgot to talk about it from uh us. I don't know if you want to talk about it from the city.

SPEAKER_04

Yeah, they you know, because obviously they have this, they're pushing us out, so they gotta have solutions and and what their options are gonna be for maintaining population control. Uh and one of them was uh birth control for animals. Wow, yeah, okay. And uh I just couldn't couldn't believe that uh that that came out of their mind. I'm like, so you're telling me you're going to try to manage herds of elk with birth control. So now you're talking about feeding the elk. Feeding them, yeah. And then something that has something in it, some kind of contraceptive in it. So now you're talking about, okay, what's that gonna cost? Uh I can't imagine that's cheap because you're gonna have to use helicopters or airplanes to airdrop the stuff in somewhere remotely in the backcountry. Yeah. So these elk can eat it. And then and then I mean, again, you're still quit. I just I couldn't wrap my head around it. I'm like, you and then they're n non-lethal ways of sterilizing sterilizing and stuff, and you're like quit getting involved in God's creation, uh quit trying to always do stuff, man.

SPEAKER_01

It's disgusting.

SPEAKER_04

I you know, I I I have a hard time you know trying to see the other side of this and and and what they're trying to do. I I am all for you know, people not being cruel to animals. Absolutely. That's something I can definitely agree with. That's why we have laws on the books. Exactly. Um but when you try to what they call it like emotional politics, right? They're just trying to, or emotional-based conservation. It never works. It there's a been a system for a long time on conservation and how we do it. And when you bring emotions into that, that's when it all goes down. Same with like Colorado and the Wolves and um just Colorado in general and their their emotional decision making on their their uh hunting strategies. Same with Washington's the same way, you know. They they they got rid of spring bear hunting over there.

SPEAKER_02

You know, like and trapping. And trapping, you know, and uh yeah. Talk about two places I would never want to live, Colorado and Washington. Yeah, or even go to hunt, honestly. I I don't want to give them money, right?

SPEAKER_04

Yeah, cuz because they bring people, and and that's the thing is you have these people who are making these uh conservation decisions that have d don't know anything about conservation or have never hunted or never done any of that, but somehow they get into office without any credentials on on these matters, and they make decisions that affect hundreds of thousands of people.

SPEAKER_02

Well, and then in the Colorado instance, you have a uh uh volunteer board, right, that goes against what their biologists, these are the folks who are paid to study and understand the animals that they're in charge of, right? They're trying to do the best for their state and the animals that are within it to continue to manage that population. And then you provide that recommendation to your volunteer board, who is the governing board, saying, Hey, yay or nay, we're gonna do this or not do this, and they completely ignore them and go the other direction.

SPEAKER_04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

Then why do we have all these people out here doing all this hard work? We're paying them a lot of money to do this hard work to make sure that we have sustainable populations, and you're gonna be like, Yeah, yeah, my aunt told me that these wolves are really cute, so we need to bring them in. Yeah, gosh. Right, yeah.

SPEAKER_04

Now, I have a question on this is so when it relates to fishing, is that even does that hit on just catch and release? Like you're not even supposed to your harassment at that point. Right. Like I think.

SPEAKER_02

I guess I don't know, but you know, you always have that incidental kill, so it could be do you want to be that guy who is just like, oh okay, maybe I overbagged because it's a fish and you know, catch and release only, but and oh it accidentally died. Well, now I committed a crime.

SPEAKER_04

Right. Yes, I mean, even even fly fishermen, right? Like most fly fishermen just it's all catch and release for the most part, but you still have those instances where you know either that fish inhaled your fly and now it's back in the gills, and you're trying to get it out of its gills, and then you end up with the case.

SPEAKER_02

I would have a hard time thinking that any hunter or fisherman or trapper or really anyone who's ever in the woods and has seen life like animal cruelty on cruelty, like animal on animal cruelty, like they're mean to each other, right? Man, yeah, it's they have apex predators, you know. Yep, and if they've ever been out there and they've ever seen that or participated in any of this, I have a hard time ever thinking, or eat honestly, even eating a nice steak. Yeah, how would you ever vote for this? Yeah, how would you ever sign up for this petition and say, yeah, I think this is good. Yeah, right.

SPEAKER_04

I think on the topic of bear hunting, right? Like a lot of a lot of people don't understand that bears have some of the biggest impact on deer and elk populations comparatively to wolves. I mean, and correct me if I'm wrong here. Um wolves tend to target older, mature bulls late in the season and younger calves um when they can when the snow is deep. Um or in calving season, I'm sure they the wolves will get them. But bears will during calving season will smell when a cow has dropped a calf. They can smell the the freshly born calf, and they will go eat that calf right in front of its mother without a care in the world. They're like snack time. Yeah. I always eat meal.

SPEAKER_02

I don't know the the science or the facts behind it, the statistics. It seems right. Yeah, but I don't know that for s uh when I when I always come back to it, I always remind people I'm not a biologist, so I I arrest people when they uh when they uh violate the law and they poach. But other than that, it gets out into speculation land for me. But I have seen, you know, where coyotes are out there, they're always ch chasing that afterbirth. You know, and right now we're in calving season, right? Cabbing calves have been dropping all around us on the ranches around us for months now. And um we have a you know huge coyote problem, but you're not gonna be able to control that coyote problem. Right. You know, yeah. Um you buy this, it does it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if it's a hundred thousand dollar house that you buy, it's special to you, or if it's a five million dollar mansion, right? It's special to you and it's yours. And you have now some rodents that have taken over a portion of it, and you're gonna call a wildlife control operator or someone to to come out and take care of that. Now you're not gonna be able to. And you're just gonna have to eat it. Yeah. Eat it. Your your house is gonna be undermined, and you are going to take bear that financial responsibility because a small group of people has said we know better than you, and we're gonna force our will upon you.

SPEAKER_04

Yeah. Well, and I think I think too many people try to humanize animals too much. Animals are animals. I mean, uh you look at it like they just don't act like these Disney creatures that you see in the movies. Like everybody looks at these Disney movies and they humanize animals so much that that's not how they operate. They don't they don't have emotions like we do. No. You know, like when inevitably when that, you know, elk cow drops a calf and a bear comes by and eats that thing in front of her, she doesn't have I'm uh speculation here. I'm pretty sure she probably doesn't have PTSD from that. She's gonna go make another one and she's gonna protect it.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, you know, she does have that connection and want to protect it. But when it's done done, yeah, I I think you know.

SPEAKER_04

Right. As animals do. It's it's part of how they've lived for thousands of years, right? They things happen, they they move on. Even the injuries you see when when you get a deer that's injured. Um, and to us, we're like, oh, that poor thing is suffering. And to that deer, it's just adapted to whatever injury it's has, and it just continues on its life.

SPEAKER_01

It's like our dogs, man. Yeah. Look how tough they are, right? Yeah. They they gotta lose a leg and they just hop around on those legs and they're happy as can be. Yeah. All right.

SPEAKER_04

Yeah, next. We I think and that's where this comes into play is people give that humanization to animals too much. You know, that they they think that they have these kind of feelings that you know they want to be coddled and left or wrong. Because you you your dog wants to cuddle, right? But that's its instinct. It lets a pack animal. It it it enjoys that comfort of being around you and and you're part of that pack at that point.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, but like any other animals, like they're just different. You know, you you you sparked something there. Um I want to say that there's a part of this that basically you you can kill an animal, right, if it is going to kill you, right? And you have to protect yourself or you have to protect another person from um that animal uh killing that other person. But I also believe that there was like some animal on animal action too, and that was part of this. And I'd probably have to double, you know, like reread this, but you you basically can protect another animal from another animal being killed. Oh wow, yeah. So I mean, maybe maybe you can maybe that's your carve out, right? Yeah, right. I'd have to reread it just to make sure I get that verbiage right, but maybe that's okay. Well, I'm just hey, I'm just here to protect that baby calf there from that coyote because that coyote's looking at it off like it like it's lunch. Yeah, and I need to protect it. That deer was about to step on a mouse. That's true. Oh, yeah. A vole.

SPEAKER_01

There's a lot more voles up there. Maybe the vole was gonna hurt the deer with the hole, and the deer is about to step in, so you gotta get the kill the vole or kill the deer. No, that wouldn't make sense, actually. No. Well, you're you're just gonna kill them both. Yeah. Yeah. No, now I'm in trouble. Now I'm going to jump in.

SPEAKER_02

Maybe we need to just add to this and and and protect plants as well.

SPEAKER_01

That's a question. So that's where I want to go with that. This is where I always tell a vegan. I'm like, here. All right. Is that a person? A vegan? A vegan. Is that a name? I'm gonna tell a vegan, yeah. I'm like, all right, so you're against all meat and all that stuff. I'm like, I'm going to drop you off in the middle of the woods and survive. Just survive. What are you and what are you ultimately gonna end up doing? More likely your instincts are gonna come in. I'm like, I'm gonna kill that fucking bird. Yeah. You know?

SPEAKER_02

You're gonna get hungry enough that you're gonna eat anything.

SPEAKER_01

Anything. It's gonna come the meat.

SPEAKER_02

Well, you see it on that show alone. Or you're gonna get so hungry you're gonna eat anything, you're gonna eat the wrong thing for sure. Vegetable. That's true. Yeah. And you're gonna go either go on a trip. Yeah, or you or you're gonna go on the ultimate trip. Yeah, right. Trip to the ultimate job from this world. I know. Oh no.

SPEAKER_04

And that on the alone, that there'll be contestants that come on there that are vegetarian and they're or they're herbologists and they know plants. And they they've there's been a few that have made it pretty far, but you can't sustain that. Yeah, like winter. Exactly. Like it to be able to sustain that. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

And there's nothing wrong with being a vegetarian or vegan or anything like that, right? No, no, absolutely. If that's your thing, man, it's your thing. Do it, but don't force it on everyone else. And that's what this comes down to. This whole initiative petition is forcing a few, and it really is a few people's will upon everyone. Right. You know, if we get to that point in society where we're saying, hey, you know what? It's we all need to eat vegetables, and that's it. You know, as a society, we're all gonna say that. Yeah. One what is it, Battlestar Galactica? All for one, one for all.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

Sorry, yes, I am a BS T.

SPEAKER_01

Is that the bug? Is that the Bugs movie? Uh that's Starship Troopers.

SPEAKER_04

That's Starship Troopers, yeah.

SPEAKER_01

Okay. Oh, yeah, yeah, different one. Totally different. Totally different, okay.

SPEAKER_04

Great movie. That's one we should watch on one of our movie nights.

SPEAKER_01

That'd be a good one. That'd be a funny one.

SPEAKER_04

Yeah, we just watched Red Dawn the other day.

SPEAKER_01

Oh Classic? Yeah, the classic. Okay, yeah, you gotta watch classic, yeah. Oh my gosh.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. Oh, they acting so funny. Oh, I want that truck too, by the way.

SPEAKER_02

All right. I've seen a couple of them driving around this week.

SPEAKER_04

Nice. I know everybody's got their new car, uh, their old classics coming out. The weather's nice. I know. Everybody's getting the one day. Motorcycles are out. Yeah, we're almost there. Yeah. It's yeah, the that acting's important.

SPEAKER_02

You know, the guys shooting machine guns like shooting it from their hip. So we were out looking at a property, speaking of machine guns, we were out looking at a property the other day, and I'm like, there's someone shooting on some other property nearby, but not too close, but you could hear it, you know, and you're just like, oh, okay. You know, and and it's I was thinking to myself, how do you explain that to someone who's not around firearms, right? Right. They're like, oh, how do you know they weren't just like, you know, the whole semi-auto versus auto type thing? I I like words, words matter, right? And so you don't call a automatic, you know, semi-auto an automatic, right? Yeah. And so you know that isn't like right. It's like you pull it and you go. I mean, it's good, especially when you've shot one, you know, you're like, Oh yeah. Oh, yeah. And you just know the sound. Yeah. You know the sound. You know the sound, but you also know the movement, right? Lean into it, lean into it. Oh, yeah, go back.

SPEAKER_01

Don't lean back. Gosh, I want to shoot. I miss shooting the 240, dude. That was my favorite gun in the military. That was a good one, man. It's a fun gun. It's way better. Everybody's like, oh, the 50 cal, my bro. The 50 cal is actually really lame. It is a really lame gun. It's not fun. The the 240 though, a 762 by 51.

SPEAKER_04

Goes it's butter. I will say the 50 cal on the on the Humvee is that is fun. Because it I the the enjoyable part is when you feel the Humvee getting rocked back from the when you just and you feel that, yeah. You feel the Humvee pull back. That you're like, hold this thing's got some snort. That's crazy. The the Bradleys with the uh what is that? I think it's 60 millimeter bush gun. I think it's a 102, ain't it? The bush gun? Yeah. I'm way off. It's been so long. I'm not a Bramby guy. Those are freaking sweet, man. Really? The chain guns. Yeah. That's a bushmas chain. I can't remember what caliber that is. Somebody will correct me in the comments, but those are cool.

SPEAKER_02

Sadly, yeah. I went straight into civilian law enforcement like at 18, right? I got hired on as a cadet for the Oregon State Police. And I I didn't go the military route, but I tell you what, some of we've trained in a lot of areas with like military bases and stuff like that. And so that's when you get a cool play with the cool toys. Heck yeah. So that's fun. Yeah. Yeah. You're kind of like, hey guys, what are you doing?

SPEAKER_03

All right.

SPEAKER_02

So I spent I spent 20 plus years as a rangemaster, so I got to kind of interface with some of those guys. So that's always fun. How many years have you been in again? Is that 30? So yeah, I started at 18. And so I worked seasonal positions while I went to college. Yeah, and then got hired on. So but I started, yeah, June of 93. So 33 years ago. That's awesome. Yeah. Got hired on in 97. So coming up on whatever that is, 29 years solid. Man. Yeah. Dang. Good for you. Yeah. You're almost there. Yeah. Man, I'm there. Yeah. Now, if I could just convince the wife of it. Um, yeah. So yeah, I think we got enough, but she's like, no, we just need a little bit more each month. And I'm like, uh, one more year. One more year. Yeah. Yeah, that's what it is. It's always one more year.

SPEAKER_04

It was those the guys at the PD and stuff. Yeah, one more year. Crunch the numbers on I'm gonna do one more year. One more year. And they said that for three more years. Yeah. It is though.

SPEAKER_02

I mean, when you when you get to that point, you really look at it and you're like, ah, if it was just 20 bucks, yeah, I'm dude, I'm out, I'm done, right? But when you like, oh, you know, a couple hundred bucks a month in today's economy, right? And that's the other thing. You start looking at insurance, you start looking at all that stuff with retirement, it all factors in, and it all makes, you know, I don't want to work when I'm done. No, not at all. You know, I don't know.

SPEAKER_01

I want to do my thing, yeah. Right. Well, you got some pretty cool things in the works, man. I do, yeah. Yeah, you do some sweet things in the works.

SPEAKER_02

I have some I have some YouTube aspirations, right? Yeah, I've got a channel. Tell us about that.

SPEAKER_01

Well, if you're willing to.

SPEAKER_02

I'll I'm I'll do everything except the name of the channel, right? Because I'm not quite there yet. So um, one of the things that I learned about YouTube is that you know, if you start watching these folks and they're like, how do you grow? I mean, there's people they're like, they literally, their whole job is growing your YouTube channel. Um, so Danielle and I we're looking at what do we want to do when we're done, right? She's gonna be done too. She because we want to spend our time together, right? So she's not eligible to retire. But if she's working and I'm at home, right, that's gonna be boring. I don't want to do that. So we're gonna spend our entire time together, we're gonna travel, we're gonna hunt, trap, fish, do all those things together. Um, part of what we want to do is also build a house. We don't want a house that's built, right? We want either a fixer upper or something that we can do that that manual labor, right? That blood, sweat equity, right, that goes into it. But also film that. There's some great folks out there. There's some in Idaho and Alaska and elsewhere that have done this and have done very well. And it's like, well, if you want to retire, you don't want to work, well, you know, what do you want to do, right? Well, it's great to retire, but you need money to pay for that insurance, right? You need this or that. So we're looking at just, you know, doing enough of YouTube that we can pay for health insurance, which goes up every year, you know, and and it maybe put out some really neat content, show people that you can do this, you can be done and be done. You don't go out to your second job, right? A lot of cops they they retire. Well, I'm gonna go work security for a timber company or the hospital or the PA. Yeah, right. Yeah. I don't want to do that, right? I'm done dealing with people, right? I want to be done. I want to, I just want to do my thing. And so to be able to do that and show people that you can, that you can go out there and you can just do your own thing, you can create your own thing, uh, is what we're looking at doing. Some definitely some inspiration out there on YouTube that they've done it. I I think it can be replicated, just a little bit different, right? Definitely spin on it. Yeah, yeah. And so I've got a few, I've got nine videos out there right now, not a lot, right? Um, but I'm letting it grow organically so that the crowd that's interested in it is going to click on it and they're gonna watch it. Yeah. Um they say what you don't do when you want to grow that channel is you don't tell your friends and you don't tell your work partners, you you know, your coworkers, and you don't tell family. Because they'll all go and they're like, oh yeah, well, they told us about this. And so they only watched like a few minutes of it and then it's gone, right? And to get the algorithm, you need people to watch all the way through and be diligent enough to say, you know what, I like that video just like this video. Like and subscribe. Yeah, well, I'm done. Thank you. Absolutely, because that grows your channel. And if you want to see more content from these folks and you want to see that get out to more people, that's how you do that, right? You you have to get that engagement, but it's got to grow organically with the people who are willing to engage in that content. And so if I say threw out my channel name here, and then a whole bunch of people who are I I like to use this example because it's it's kind of funny. If their like thing, their time on YouTube is spent with their kids watching Barbie or Polypockets or something like that, and then they go and they watch your channel, it throws off the algorithm. It really does. So you have to be in that groove until you're so big it doesn't fail, right? You always have that core audience that comes back, and then your channel can thrive on that. So, anyways, just what I've what I've learned trying to get into this this field, right? You know, and uh I move around too much for a podcast.

SPEAKER_05

So I'm not trying to keep it here.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, I'm really excited for you. I think that's gonna be an amazing channel, and you guys are gonna do exceptionally well. Yeah, I I I think so.

SPEAKER_02

It's gonna be just basically it's going to be the opposite of this petition, right? It's going to be hunting, it's going to be trapping, it's going to be fishing. My wife loves to hunt, she loves to fish. I do the trapping. And we love to be self-sufficient, right? We're doing sourdough. We just got a freeze dryer and we've been freeze-drying everything. And and it's not necessarily, right, for like long-term, like, oh, hey, you know, this is like because we want to live remote, away from people and everything. It's because we want to make less trips to town. Sure. Yeah. Right? We don't want to go to town, which is a two like two hours to get to town to the to the store. Yeah. Right. We don't want to do that four times a month. Right. We want to do it once, come back, freeze-dry that, and then use it over the month and save that money. Sure. Man, and then being an outdoorsman, making your own freeze-dried meals. Seriously. I mean absolutely. We were we were so there's some really cool stores here. We've never been in. Um, there's one up in Sandpoint North 40. North 40. Yeah. Went in there and then had all this selection. So I'm like, take pictures of this, right? Yeah. So that we can see what it is. So we have ideas for meals. Yeah. They're all what, 10 bucks, 7 bucks, 15 bucks, whatever it is. Easily each one, and be able to do that yourself. And then, you know, we've got like these little uh silicone trays and everything. So you can get a meal in each one with five trays of those. And so you're talking, you've got your entire hunt done with one setting of right. And you're making like your homemade meals.

SPEAKER_01

That's hungry. I'm thinking about all the meals. I just saw the coolest thing that you can do with a freeze dryer, and I don't mean to cut you off, Austin. You're good. Um people freeze drying sauces. Yeah. Sauces. Yeah. Um that is brilliant. Yeah. I'm like, and you can cut it like a pizza and then put it a little thing and then bring it in the backcountry throwing your jet boil, and you're good. I'm like, that is brilliant. Brilliant.

SPEAKER_02

What do you think? Uh, you know, the oh shoot, the ramen. That's true. The packets that are in the ramen. Yeah. That's what it is. Just freeze-dried broth, right? Exactly. Wow, man. You just freeze-dry your broth and then you've got it all set. So we just got done doing um, you know, future content. This would be a future video, but uh, we just got done doing 360 eggs. Wow. Yes. Well, so we have 19 chickens, right? 18 hens and what and one boy watching out for all of them. Yeah. All right. And he does, he's great, man. Birds come around and he gathers them up. He's like, hey, there's something going on. He gets them kind of yeah, it's great. But uh we average about a dozen eggs a day. And so at some point when we move, we're not gonna have these chickens, right? We're not gonna try to, you know, the clamp us, we're not throwing them on top and driving across the country. We're just not gonna do that, right? Chickens strapped in a cage. Right? Yeah, that'd be great. I don't have any grandmothers left, so there's nothing, there's no one who can be in the in the rocker, so we're not gonna bring the chickens either. So um so great reference. I know, yeah. So we're we're gonna basically we have these stored in 12 um quart jars, and they can be stored in there for 25 years. So when we move, as we're building up this homestead that we're looking at doing, we don't have to get those chickens right away. We don't have to start that process, which chickens do take time, right? They they are time-consuming effort. Um, we will have our eggs already there. Are you like scrambling them and then putting them in there and then yeah, man, just yeah. Actually, Danielle was scrambling by hand, and I'm like, put them in the uh the mixer and do it that way. And she's like, actually, it's just easier to do it by hand. So yeah. Fair. Yeah. The other day she was like really, she's like her hands were like blistered because she cracked so many eggs and washed them and then like was mixing them, and she's just like, Oh, my hands hurt.

SPEAKER_04

That's work. That sounds like a lot of work. Um well and contrary to like if you you know if you've had bad freeze-dried eggs, like uh we've had them in the military before. Oh, yeah. Um, that are just awesome. So hotel stays, yeah. Yep, hotels, yeah. You're like, it's still in the shape of the bag. Just warped it up. Like, I can see the corner of the bag. You're like, yeah. But uh, I saw a video where uh this family was doing that freeze-dried eggs, and they they made a fresh scrambled eggs, and then they did their freeze-dried ones and did the blind test, yeah. Taste test, yeah.

SPEAKER_02

Couldn't couldn't taste the difference. Really? Wow. Nope. That's fast. They're like, it's all in how you make it, right? Yeah, you know, you just don't just throw it out there and just mix it up and just call it good. You know, you gotta season it. You gotta add your milk to it to make it a little bit more creamy, stuff like that. Put some cheese on it, you know, all that stuff. Yeah, we had eggs this morning. So make me want I want to get a freezer ID. I think we'd get a lot of use out of it.

SPEAKER_00

Uh yeah, yeah, yeah, I think we would.

SPEAKER_02

So, yeah, so that's what we're looking at doing. We're looking at just that homesteading lifestyle, taking it's it's the things that we already do. Danielle will spend like her weekend cooking us meals and then freezing them all, and then we have lunches for a month, and we just grab a frozen lunch out of the freezer. You know, when I'm driving around at work all day, I've got one of those little plug-in um lunchbox heaters. Oh, the warmers. Yeah. Oh, cool. Oh, yeah. And in two hours, I've got a hot meal for lunch. That's awesome. You know, and so just saving money, stuff like that is just I wish I would have done that when I was working.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, and I also wish uh jet boils were around when I was in the the military. Yeah. I would have never had an MRE. No. Nope. Nope. I got my peak meals, my jet boil, I'm good to go.

SPEAKER_04

I would absolutely take uh peak meals instead of MREs. All day. Those are awful, dude.

SPEAKER_02

Dude, they're brutal, bro. Hey, but you gotta have one every now and then just to remind yourself.

SPEAKER_04

Oh man, what was I doing? Uh I think I was going through some bins in my in my garage and I found a bin that I had some stockpiled MREs. And I'm like, why do I still have these? Bro, they're literally one molecule away from plastic. Plastic, yeah. And so I'm going through them and I got the kids with me, and I'm like, oh, this is what I used to eat a lot when I was, you know, at drill or whatever. And uh I didn't eat any MREs when I was overseas. Really? Dude, I was you were aviation. I was aviation, dude. I was a flight. I was we had our own compound.

SPEAKER_01

You gotta see women.

SPEAKER_04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

I was just around dudes for ten months. Yeah, did you smell you dudes? MREs were a thing up there for you guys. For a bit, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. 'Cause we we did have a cook where His name was Cookie, great guy. Uh he got flown in, and we would have Blackhawks come in and bring us food from time to time. But there's times that they couldn't come in because the weather was really bad for a while, so we'd eat our MREs.

SPEAKER_02

Did they bring the Chuck Wagon? The Chuck Wagon? Yeah, the Chuck Wagon up there. Oh man. Yeah, it's too bad.

SPEAKER_04

Yeah. So I was going through these MREs and I was kind of showing some of the kids the ones that were my favorites when I was eating them and I freaking opened them up and like let them play around with it. And I was like, all right, try it. I gave them a cracker. Oh god. Oh, they were like, ugh. They're like, what? What? No, no, you take the, you take, okay, you try the wheat snack bread and you put some cheese on it. I like the wheat snack. Baked cheese. Baked cheese. Yeah, yeah. And I was like, it's good. And then I tried it and I was like, it's all trans fat.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, I used to like, I used to devour it. Sloppy Joe was my favorite MRE. Yeah. It was the best, in my opinion.

SPEAKER_04

And the brownie. Oh my god, did you ever the brownie? For me it was the chili mac.

SPEAKER_01

Oh, chili mac is the big chili mac too.

SPEAKER_04

And then you melt, you put the cheese packet in with the heating element to get the warm, and then you put the cheese in with the chili mac.

SPEAKER_01

You make some gourmet gourmet meals after a while.

SPEAKER_02

To bring this around, if you live in Oregon and maybe six years or so, that might be all you're eating. That's true. That's true. Is MREs because otherwise, you know, you'd be harming animals.

SPEAKER_04

Right. That's true. Yeah, and the only thing they harm making MREs is plastic. Yeah. Yep. So it's all good. It's all good.

SPEAKER_02

It's all good.

SPEAKER_04

Go down to your food distribution center, you can get your MREs, get your gas rations, you can get your MREs, you can so back to the bill. If this if this comes to and gains the traction it needs, so the next step, right, is it gets on the ballot. Yes. And then once it's on the ballot, can it stay on the ballot the next year? No. No.

SPEAKER_02

Voted on and done. And then they if it doesn't pass and there's a small group of people that want to force their will upon people again, then they try again. Which they probably would. You know, there's always sadly people out there that are trying to force their way. Rather than we make a joke about it, right? Every time we come to Idaho. In fact, the first time that Danielle and I came to Idaho, we just we weren't even married, we're just dating. And I drove across the border from um Ontario, Oregon. She's like, and she's looking at me like, what are you doing? I'm like, you smell that? She goes, No. Like, that's a smell of freedom. It's freedom. Nice. And so it's a joke every time we come into Idaho. I'm like, smell that. She goes, What? It smells like freedom, right? And I'm like, Yeah, you know, and then uh so then we went to Montana, and uh I I kind of threw a different twist on it, but I'll I'll save that for another time. So yeah. I recorded, I I like just I start the camera rolling, right? Hands free, put it on the dash and just start it recording. I'm like, hey, you smell that. She's like, you're recording, aren't you? I'm like, yeah, yeah. Come on, don't ruin it for me. I gotta do it again. Yeah. That's right.

SPEAKER_01

Content creation, man.

SPEAKER_02

So, you know, whether I don't think this will pass. I think we have enough smart people in the state of Oregon. There's a lot of great people in Oregon, right? Don't get me wrong, there's great people, especially in Eastern Oregon. Um, no, they're great people everywhere, right? Uh my parents are in Western Oregon. I can't I can't hold them at fault. Um, but there's really good people there, and I don't see this passing this time. But as our society changes, and as I don't know, we just have changed since I I hate to I'm not gonna use the C word, right? But things have changed, and and the the forcing of will upon people has become more common. Sure. Yeah, right? It's gonna keep happening too, unfortunately. Yeah, and and and it's not like we're trying to get out of Oregon to come to greatest freedom in the world, right? We're all free. Yeah. Um, but there are things that are not happening here that are happening on in Oregon, you know, like beaver trapping just pretty much went away this year starting January 1 of 2026 in Oregon, yeah. Because they did it right, man. They did they they're getting the playbook down. If they want to ban something, they're no they know how to do it. You know how to do it. Um they went to the small forests first, right? And they got them all to join this small forest accord. Well, it's great. You're you're part of this membership, right? And you have all of these benefits, and but rather not, and one of the requirements is if you're part of this small forest accord, you cannot allow trapping on your lands. Okay, so they restrict trapping that way. But you were talking about well, imagine all of all of your private timber ground in or in in Idaho. Okay, so when I'm looking at on X, a lot of them I'm looking at there are potlatch, Stimpson, you know, all the old warehouses stuff pretty much. Yeah, right? For sure. So uh it's a majority of the land that's out that is out there that people in this state are gonna use to hunt and trap, do whatever that you know that they're allowed to do on those lands. So they took that away in Oregon. Next, they took the authority for beaver trapping away from the scientists, the biologists with the state of Oregon, and they put it in the hands of the the Department of Environmental Quality, the water quality people. All right, so they made a rule, basically, that if a waterway is impaired, you cannot trap on that for beaver, you can't trap on that waterway on any the of the land that's adjacent to public. Or any of the water, excuse me, in any of the water that's adjacent to public land. So that leaves all the private land, right? Yeah. Except most of the private land that you have out there, either you can't trap on it because it's someone's private property. Right. You have to have permission and they don't want people on their property. Yep. Or they do, and that's great. And the guys who do well do that. Or it's the private forests who are part of the private forest accord, and they've already banned the trapping there. Oh wow.

SPEAKER_04

So they just kind of did their due diligence and kind of snuck it in on the hands of the one piece at a time to make it work.

SPEAKER_02

So now you have whole streams that you can't trap beaver on. Dang.

SPEAKER_04

And suckers are destructive.

SPEAKER_02

They they're great. They're they are great at what they do, yeah, but they're also destructive at what they do, and there's a place and a time for all of them. Definitely. And there's a number for all of them, right? There's we're not trapping them to extinction, you know. We're not in the 17 and 1600s when we trapped them and trapped them, and that's how our states were built, by the way. What's on the Oregon flag? It's the only state that has two sides to a flag. One side's a beaver, the other side's a seal. I had no idea. I did not know that. Huh. That's cool. There's a beaver on it.

SPEAKER_01

Beavers are cool. I do like that.

SPEAKER_02

Oregon territory was built on trappers coming here. Yeah, for sure. Yep. Yep. Good or bad. Yep, good or bad. That is the history. It doesn't matter. Right. That's what happened. And we're here now. Yeah. And we live with it and we deal with it. And we and where we're at today. So what built the state of Oregon has pretty much been destroyed. Like you can no longer do that. And I mean, I live in an area where we have some of the highest concentrations and densities of beaver that there are in stream systems, even better than on the coast. But because at some point in the past, DEQ went in there and said, ah, this water is impaired. For any reason, right? That spring that starts that water could come through an arsenic funnel, right? I mean, it could come through something down in the crust of the earth that has nothing to do with us. We didn't do it. We didn't put a mine there, we didn't do any of that stuff. It just happened to go through something that made it whatever, like not quality, quality stream. But the beavers are gonna fix it. Except they haven't in all this time. So if we have some of the best beaver habitat and the most beaver per square mile in an area, and yet they're not fixing the problem, maybe beavers aren't always the answer, right? But we we that's science. Yeah. We and we have to ignore that because they've made these rules. They being the folks who have orchestrated this, right? I'm talking about a very specific set of people who orchestrated this to happen. Um so now we can't trap beaver in those areas, even though they are literally beaver upon beaver upon beaver, and you're having these issues of sickness and disease, and there's too many for that system. They just can't sustain themselves because they can't. There's no management. Yeah, yeah. And there's zero management to it anymore. As of January 1 this year. This so it's it's a pretty brand new thing. Um maybe they should put birth control in the water for the beavers. Oh, don't worry, it's already in the water. Maybe it counteracts maybe maybe it counteracts poor water quality too. You do just like a whole mixture thing. Yeah, do it all. Yeah. Throw whatever in there. It fixes everything. Throw chemicals at everything. I want to do a little work. And speaking of chemicals, right? Get on another kick, right? No, I don't I don't I I can go down rabbit holes, but uh right now there's like a huge like like fur is insane right now, right? Bobcat prices are through the roof. I did just see that actually. Great on some levels, not good on other levels where it brings people's attention and ire and all this. Oh, you're making money, blah, blah, blah. Um but you're talking about a renewable resource, you know, beaver, all your furs, bobcat, coyote, right? It's a renewable resource. If you I'm not forcing you to wear furs. So that's the difference. I'm just saying give us the option, right? Give us the us being the people who want to do this, give us that option to be able to wear furs or provide furs where they need to go to the people who want them. Don't force me to wear an oil byproduct. And I could name a whole lot of the sporting brands that are out there, and I don't want to, right? I don't want to I don't want to bring down on some of this stuff. But a lot of the stuff, start reading the label, start digging into where that coat came from. Is that coat an oil byproduct? Or is it something that actually was renewable? And start thinking about how do you feel about oil? There's a lot of these, there's a lot of people who feel that oil is the enemy, right? Gas and oil, everything should be electric. That's fine. That's fine. Give us the option, don't force it on us.

SPEAKER_04

But well, for a long time they believed oil was not a renewable resource.

SPEAKER_02

I think studies now showing that it could be. It could be.

SPEAKER_04

I think it's the blood of the earth, in my opinion. Yeah. These pockets are these oil deposits, and these pockets are suddenly filled up again after they've completely drained them. They're now there's more oil in it.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

They it fossilizes easy down there. You know, that heat and pressure just makes everything.

SPEAKER_04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah. Uh well. Dig into that though on your own, right?

SPEAKER_04

Wasn't there a theory at one point that it's the oil was made from dinosaur bones?

SPEAKER_01

Who knows, man? All I know is they don't even know what the earth looks like because they've only dug 6.8 miles down. They don't know what the center of the earth looks like. That's all theory. It's all guesses, basically. Yeah. They don't know what it looks like. Yeah. It's a lot, man. There's a long way to actually.

SPEAKER_04

I was just thinking about like looking looking down the road a mile ahead. You're like, oh, that's a waste. Six miles. I mean, it's six miles is still a long ways, but when you look it at a map. But how many miles? How much further?

SPEAKER_02

I'm trying to remember my my science, but how many miles? Is it 24,000 miles that the earth is? Supposedly. Supposedly. Is that it? I'm probably way off the road. You're about right. Supposedly. So it's a lot to get down to the center. Right, yeah. I mean, I've watched a movie or two about it, and I didn't see any oil. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04

So I don't know. I don't know. I don't know, man. Well, you're what just to caveat touch on this before we wrap things up. Yeah. What what drew you guys up this way? You know, I you you're looking either Idaho or Montana. What what is it about this area that just is drawing you up here?

SPEAKER_02

Well, this I hate to say this, but to start, it was Alaska. Not Idaho. Okay. Fair enough. But Alaska is a friggin' awesome place. It is, yeah. I would I would love to live there. Um, we actually made two trips two about two years ago. In fact, yeah, it was spring break. So it was two years ago this week, right? Because this is spring break for Oregon at least. Um, and so we flew up there and we started checking some places out, right? And there's some great folks that are doing some great stuff on YouTube up there. Um so we started looking in uh Willow area, Willow, Alaska. There is a um pretty famous YouTube kind of group, simple type living, and I don't want to say their name, but you know, probably figure it out. There, they were in that area. And so we went there and we're like, all right, this is great, but how many podcasts can or video podcasts really, you know, vlogs, whatever you call it, YouTube channels can you have right in an area? Um, and we don't, you know, we we're trying not to step on someone's toes doing kind of the same type of thing, right? So we went up there, we looked at, I mean, we went all the way down the Kenai. I hadn't been to Kenai Peninsula since I was 18. The only time I'd been up there before. No, I was 16. So it had been quite a while. Um, and so we went all the way down there, we looked at all that stuff, and then we went all the way up almost to Denali. We went way out um to the east, um, almost towards Glen's Fair Glen Ferry, no, um, that's Idaho, um, Glen Allen, uh, Glen Allen, Alaska, and we checked out a lot of areas. We really liked that Willow area, but it's like there's these other people there. So we came back, we started talking to some folks who came from Alaska that live in our area. Um, so it's kind of interesting, but you have North Pole, right? Alaska. Okay. All the, you know, that's where all the Christmas streets and everything is Christmas theme, not everything, right? But a lot of things. Yeah. Um, we live right near Christmas Valley, Oregon. And all the streets are, you know, tinsel and Christmas tree. Yeah. So it's kind of like, hey, we're gonna move from like the Christmas Valley area to uh the North Pole, right? Instead of just move from one area where Santa is to the other. But but so we started talking to these folks that lived there in Christmas Valley, and they were from Alaska, and they're like, hey, and I'm not gonna say the name because it I don't want to out these people where they're at, but this other area. So we started looking at it in Alaska, it's in the interior. Well, these folks that were doing this YouTube channel in Willow moved in the meantime to that town. And they were like, ah, crud, right? We do we don't really necessarily want to be like next door neighbors doing like competing things on YouTube. So we're like, well, that stinks. Um, and so we started looking at everything and all the different areas, trying to figure out how where we can be where we can kind of spread this out and still be have fun, right? And be in Alaska, you know, and be able to do all the Alaska things, hunting and the fishing and the travel and just the scenery. It's so amazing up there. Um, and then this winter hit, and it was negative 50 for most of the interior. Oh almost all winter. No, thank you. And I'm like, okay, let's go. I'm ready. Yeah. I'm like, yeah, please let's send me hockey. He gets to get on a lot of lakes. Yeah, send me. Yeah, everything's frozen. And so uh, but my wife said, uh, no.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, no, absolutely not.

SPEAKER_02

She's like, I I don't want to be stuck in the house for six months, right? It's dark and it's cold, and I'm not gonna be able to go outside and run and do all that stuff, right? And so that's when we started transitioning to okay, where can we go that is less taxes than Oregon? And that's a big thing. Yeah, right. I've plot I've charted everything out on paper. How much if we live with this retirement are we gonna pay in Oregon? How much are we gonna pay in Al uh uh well? I did Alaska too, and it was a lot cheaper. Uh Idaho, how much in Wyoming? How much in Montana? And then we just started looking at that and looking at all those factors, and and where can we get the biggest bang for our buck, right? Where can we live comfortably and pay less to the man? Right? The government. Absolutely. And so that's where we started looking at that. We had looked in southern Idaho, we'd done a big tour through Wyoming, checked out a bunch of areas there, and then I'm like, well, what about? I know there's a big YouTube channel that's up here, but let's go look at North Idaho. And that's where we came up here, and we're like, all right, this is the scenery that we want, right? We live next to like a huge mountain, right? It goes up for half a mile behind us, so 2,500 feet, just straight up, just like that. And so that's awesome, but everywhere else we live in the great basin, right? We we live in the great desert basin, and so it's all desert. We don't want to live in desert, we want to be in the mountains, we want to be in trees, and so that's why this area really intrigued us, and we really enjoyed that. Um, and so that's when we started looking up here. Cool. So, western Montana and northern Idaho, and really have we're trying to find something, yeah. But the other hard part is so you know, it's it's all it's everything. It's it's but it's it's what we want to do, right? It's not what someone else is gonna force us to do, it's what we want to do. Yeah, even our parents, right? Our parents may have opinions, but we're gonna do what we want to do, right? It's our life, right? And so um we looked at all those things, but then we started looking at CWD distribution, and we're like, oh man, there's a whole segment of Northern Idaho that's mandatory check-in for CWD. Yeah, I know about that this year. It was lame. So uh Onyx now has a, and I don't mean to make this an Onyx channel, but I use Onyx like exclusively at work and everything, man. I mean, it is like great tool. It is a great tool to use. You they now have a CWD layer. Oh, nice on there. See if you're gonna be hunting. There's a lot of red. There's a lot of red out there. It's now into Washington. The entire border with Idaho now is in that. There's a group that studies CWD and its most likely trajectory and where it's most likely at. All of Wyoming is covered, large portions of like around Libby, that whole area in there of Montana, that's all, you know, all that. I had no idea. So that's good research too. So, you know, we're looking at all that stuff as well as you know, the environment. We want to be around some snow, not too much, trees, mountains, stuff like that, and away, right? I I've had to deal for with people for 33 years. Well, all 52 years of my life, but uh but 33 years where it's just been a lot of times adversarial, right? Yeah, you there's some great people out there, but there's some just some really not great people out there. We don't want to see our neighbors. So where we're at, unfortunately, we're just it's it's we've gotten used to it. We we live on 1,100 acres. Our nearest neighbor is a mile to the north, two miles to the south. We can see about five miles across the desert. There's a neighbor there, that's the only one we can really see. And so we like that, right? Yeah, but we're gonna have to put some trees around us to get that up here. For sure. Yeah, and and that's you know, and so that's that's kind of the hard part, you know, trying to find that balance where we can just just be us, yeah, and not just the world can go do their things, you know. Don't force your will upon us, just let us live our lives reasonably, non-criminally, yeah. That thing wanna do the culture here. Be in trouble for it, yeah. Yeah, and it really is. It is that culture. Yeah, it's amazing. So that's what we're looking for. That's what brought us up here, and we're really um we're enjoying it. Yeah, that's a great answer, man. I appreciate that. You know, the hardest honestly, the the really the hardest part about up here is the price.

SPEAKER_04

It is you gotta pay to live here, man. You really do, yeah. The stickers, the sticker price is is high, but thankfully on the back end, that's where you end. Up kind of saving some some coin. You know, it's you know, just be like you said the taxes and just the cost of living is generally just a little lower, and so sticker prices are are are high.

SPEAKER_02

It's a bit of a sticker shock. I mean, even from Alaska, we're like, oh wow, Alaska prices are high. Yeah. And but it's the whole west coast, it is and everything. Yeah. We're we've looked at stuff like in Maine, and you're like, oh, okay, 120 acres with a 400 square foot, which we don't want. We we want something small, it's easy to clean, it's just us, right? And the animals, right?

SPEAKER_01

But you could buy stuff out there for $120,000. Yeah. The problem with the problem with the East Coast, though, is 70% of America's population is on the East Coast. I know, yeah. Which is crazy to believe. But it is. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah. And so that was, you know, because we actually traveled all the way to Tennessee, right? That was pretty much still a big one. It's a it's a great destination for folks, right? There are a lot of people going there, but then we started looking at the number of people per thousand.

SPEAKER_01

Oh, yeah, it's insane. Idaho is the safest state in the lower four and well, and in America. Yep. Safest state, number one. Yeah, we we took number one. Yep. New Hampshire, number two. Yeah, yeah. Really? Just crazy. Safe state. That is, yeah. And I understand I know why it's the safest state. And they're both kind of shaped the same. Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_02

Similar. Maybe we just need to break up these other states into Idaho shaped. Get them on board. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. Yeah. No, I appreciate this, Ryan. Seriously. Yeah. Appreciate it. A lot of good info here. Looking forward to it.

SPEAKER_02

I try to keep it to the facts, and you know, everything else is my opinion. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04

So we all have opinions. If you if you live in Oregon and this thing comes through on the ballot, make sure you make an educational choice. Uh and don't let people force their will on you. You know, be informed if you're especially if you're in in Oregon, be informed on what's coming your way when it comes to voting.

SPEAKER_02

Uh absolutely look into this. Think about what I try to do is I don't, I I try not to, I I really just it bothers me because we become a narcissist society. And I see it every day at work. I want to do this, so I'm going to do this. I don't care what the law is. Yeah. And ah man, I push back. I really push back against that. Think about your neighbor. Think about that other person more than yourself. Yeah. Right? Try not to force your will upon your neighbor. Stay in your lane. Love it. And enjoy it in your lane. Exactly. Yeah. Just get out of the left lane if you're driving slow. Yes.

SPEAKER_04

Ain't that the truth? Awesome. Well, hey, we appreciate it a ton, Ryan. It was great talking to you. And hopefully somebody, some people got some information out of this about what's going on in Oregon and some legislation that they're trying to pass on everybody.

SPEAKER_02

So yeah, and and go to, you know, get involved. Go to your groups, whether it's you know, Oregon Hunters Association, Mule Deer, Rocky Mountain Oak, Oregon Trappers, there's a lot more out there. I know I'm just covering a few of them. And don't hesitate. If you live in Idaho, right, it doesn't mean you can't be part of that organization that's going to fight this. If you think, hey, there's something going on, these organizations are doing that. Support that organization. You can go and you can support them with memberships. You don't have to be a resident of Oregon if you think, hey, this is this is kind of wrong. Because, see, this is how easy it is for a lot of these groups. I I I've kind of been reading up on some of the how they make their money, right? Follow the money. Always. It's easy for them to say, pull pull on someone's heartstring and say, donate now. And there's a whole lot of people who just like, oh, okay, sounds good. And they don't look into the facts and they don't look into what is going on. Yeah. So it's real easy for them to make a lot of money, millions and millions of dollars without even hardly lifting a finger. And it's really hard for the hunting and angling community to make money to fight this. Yeah. So if you have the opportunity, reach out to some of these groups and just become part of one for a year. Yeah. You know, and help them out to help your fellow hunters and anglers out in another state.

SPEAKER_05

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

I think that would help.

SPEAKER_04

We all gotta help each other out, even if you're in a different state for sure.

SPEAKER_02

And it all takes money.

SPEAKER_04

Yeah. What do you think? If you're in Idaho and they ban hunting in Oregon, where you think they're coming?

SPEAKER_02

What happens in Washington happens in Alaska, happens in Oregon. And when they get that block down, where does it move? It moves inland. Yep.

SPEAKER_04

So yeah. Well said. Get involved. Don't uh don't just stand by. Absolutely. Well, awesome. Appreciate it, guys. Yeah, appreciate it. Thank you very much.

SPEAKER_01

Awesome. Yeah. Until next time.